Anyone have this? Do you use it enough to warrant its cost?
I have one. I was happy with it at first, but now I’m not so thrilled. The “asking it questions” part of this device is piss poor. About 80% of the questions I ask it will render me a response of: “I’m sorry, I do not know the answer to the question you are asking” Where as I can go to OK Google on my phone and ask the same question and get a satisfactory response pretty much every time.
That said though, I recently bought some Wemo switches that allow me to control the lighting in my home via Echo. So now I’m back to liking my Echo a little bit more, but I’m still not completely thrilled with it.
ETA: I got mine on a special introductory offer for $99. Still not sure if I got my money’s worth.
ETA: Also, word recognition sucks on this device too.
Like it primarily for playing music. I can ask for any I heart Radio station based on artist and it’ll pull it up. Also access our prime music and others.
Moderator Action
Since this is basically an informal poll, let’s move it to IMHO.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Can it access the music on my phone purchased from iTunes?
No and yes. No, it only works with music you’ve purchased through Amazon or music you’ve added to your Prime Music Library (which requires you to be a Prime member). Yes, you could upload up to 250 songs from your iTunes folder to Amazon for free.
For $25/year you can upload up to 250,000 songs from your iTunes folder (or anywhere else on your computer) to Amazon and have them available in your library and thus your echo.
Anyway, I have one. I have a Prime account and got the $99 deal when it came out. I listen to it pretty much every night when I am futzing around getting ready for bed and stuff. I have over 2000 songs on my playlist - about 300 I’ve purchased and the rest are all free Prime Music albums. I go a little crazy and just add everything.
It’s cool because I’ve discovered at least 3 new-to-me artists already by reading about them somewhere and finding their stuff free on Prime Music and adding it.
You can ask “what is this?” when a song comes up, and that is nice for me since I throw so much random stuff on my playlist. You can also see what is playing on your phone or at http://echo.amazon.com. And you can skip, stop and change volume either using the app, website or voice. If you’re not close enough to use the voice (it hears pretty well) there is a remote control you can speak in to.
I also ask it the weather most days when I am getting dressed after work. That is nice because I don’t need to stop what I’m doing to look at my phone or computer.
It has sports scores and schedules, that’s pretty good. I’ve used it a few times to look up word definitions too.
If you’re in to Pandora and/or iHeartRadio it will play that stuff too.
If you’ve got any home automation packages, it’ll fit with those. I do not.
I really like it but I am not sure if it is worth more than $99 to me. Especially since I’ve got computers all over the house from which to play my music. Then again I’ve probably listened to it more than 99 hours since I got it in July, so I guess I am getting my money’s worth!
If you want a nice voice-activated music player in your house then this is good. You just gotta be down with Amazon, which I totally am.
I also got in on the intro offer for $100 that included the remote. For $180 without the remote, I don’t think I would replace it (I just looked the price up and it’s on $150 special today). I mostly ask it the weather in the morning when I’m getting dressed and maybe a news brief. It’s somewhat useful as a shopping list tool as you just tell it “add butter to shopping list” and that shows up in the Alexa app on your phone. Other than that, I sometimes stream a talk show from iHeart or stream a Pandora station or just ask for artist or song and let it pick from wherever it can find it.
Yes, once paired with your phone it can play music from any app like a regular Bluetooth speaker. It has some control function (pause, play, next, previous) over iTunes and Spotify, but the app has to be running on your in-range paired device. I don’t use iTunes, so I don’t know how well it works.
Native support for Amazon Prime Music, your personal Amazon music library, Audible Pandora and iHeart allows it to access those accounts directly without involving your phone, once you set up your accounts with the Alexa app.
I put mine in the living room and mainly use it for music, the weather, the time (I don’t have a clock) and Wikipedia.
It works great for most of those uses – I especially like being able to walk home and have music start playing on cue, or to have it read aloud random Wikipedia articles when I’m curious about something.
She’s nowhere as intelligent as Google Now (or, I presume, Siri – who I’ve never actually used). But she’s a loyal if stunted musical servant.
By the way, many new Android phones/tablets have an option to turn Google Now always on, even when the screen is off – so you can speak to your phone from across the room, saying “OK Google” and then asking it to play a song or whatever. Google Now is much smarter than Echo.
Alexa’s advantages are 1) she has a much better speaker and 2) she has a much better multi-orientation microphone array
Yep. I find the Echo can hear me from much farther away than my Moto X, but Google Now is superior to Amazon’s voice command. I have found that the Echo is really good for setting alarms when cooking.
I find the speaker to be good, but not great. I’d prefer to listen to music on the speakers connected to my receiver, but that doesn’t have the ‘cool-ness’ of the voice activation of the Echo. So generally, I prefer to use the Echo for podcasts (as really those don’t need great speakers).
I also find its pretty useful asking the Echo for random sports scores or the weather.